This is the amazing story of Mala, a Jewish girl who hid in plain sight of the murderers of her people. She lived with a dedicated Nazi family who treated her as a Polish girl of German extraction with great kindness, unlike her own family where she was ignored by her father and dismissed by her mother. This was one of the many contradictions which made up her life.

But this is more than the story of Mala, a Jewish girl who survives the Holocaust through a combination of good luck and her Aryan looks. This is the story about pre- and post-war Poland and its attitudes towards Jews, as well as the anti-Semitism experienced by the Holocaust survivors when they tried to return to Poland in the immediate post-war years. It’s also about how history is remembered and re-written and the treatment of Arabs in the newly formed state of Israel.

The scope that this book covers makes it a more challenging read. It is a book of great scholarship and despair. Despair that, despite the horrors of the Holocaust, there still exists attempts to marginalise groups that, in many ways, follow the blueprint laid down by the Nazis who tapped into traditional eastern European anti-Semitism.

Towards the end we reflect on Mala’s life.

As a 13-year-old girl, she was living in Warsaw when the Germans isolated (the ghetto) and later killed around 300 000 people. She fled the ghetto in time, only to find herself at the very heart of the ‘bloodlands’, where the biggest genocide of the 20th Century was gathering pace, much of it carried out with knives, clubs, and pitchforks. She escaped again, this time to the nation of the perpetrators. From there it was back to Poland and the post-war violence inflicted on Jewish survivors, while Germans were being driven from their homes, towns, and cities. She had been through all this to only to arrive in Lod, a city which created its own ghetto and drove out the local Arabs under appalling circumstances.

Most definitely a book you should read. But it is a book that you need to take your time, dipping in and out maybe a couple of chapters at a time, because you need that time to digest its contents.

Reviewed by Anthony Llewellyn-Evans